The Five Fingered Journal
by Enigmatic Insignia
Summary: The summer has ended, the world hasn't, and Dipper wants to be looking forward to high school as much as Mabel is. Instead, he's plagued with suspicion that Bill isn't quite as gone as everyone thought. Is his paranoia catching up with him, or has weirdness followed him to Piedmont?
1. Blame the Arson

Usually, burning one's cursed possessions didn't involve copious amounts of melted sugar, but something about defeating a being of pure chaos energy seemed to call for s'mores. At least, the Pines Family had thought so.

It was odd to consider just how quickly the concept of odd itself could leave once Dipper and Mabel left Gravity Falls. It hadn't even been a week, and already, they were immersed in their old status quo. Tomorrow was the first day of high school. Tonight, like most nights, was supposed to be comprised of sound sleep. Technically, Dipper was, indeed, sleeping.

As with many things, the specification of "technically" here wasn't a good sign.

Dipper had been standing in an empty void, encompassed by the sight of absolutely nothing. It like the bottomless pit, in a way, except his feet were planted firmly on some sort of ground, albeit one he had no means of seeing. Then, the sky lit up with an unearthly, almost pixelated flame, and he was left without nearly as much time to think as he had to witness.

The horizon was comprised entirely of a blazing marshmallow-like goo, in a form similar to a cloud, or smog. Wind whistled around his ears at the pitch of what could only be described as an asthmatic kazoo. Within seconds, globs of now-boiling marshmallow were dripping from the sky in baseball-sized spheres. They crashed across the clear field of flickering neon triangles, which were lit in so many colors, they just about blurred into a unified fluorescent brown—a logically impossible color which fit shockingly well with a logically impossible sight.

At first, Dipper raised an arm and hunched to dodge a coming ball of marshmallow hail. No sooner did it pass his head than a second glob lobbed itself straight at him. He stumbled back, and his left heel knocked against a boiling pile of hot marshmallow goop. The instant the goop hit his sock, it burned through the fabric to dig at his skin. The white mass warped up, coiling into the form of a two-headed snake. It started to split apart from itself in a slain-hydra-like fashion while it slithered up his leg in multiple directions.

Again, Dipper was left without so much as second to consider what this cloud-critter was, how to get it off, or if anything remotely similar had been in any of the journals before. Instead, what little space in his brain had not been preoccupied with the faint burning sensation, or the atypically black shade of the sky, or the obnoxious noise pollution from an indeterminate source, was thoroughly occupied by a grating "WELL, WELL, WELLWELLWELL—"

The cloudy, confectionary smog had melted to form a distinctly triangular hole in the black void of a sky. A hazy dark-lit glow cast across the field, muting the multitude of colors with a monochromic haze. Thin, stick-like arms and legs jettisoned out from the shape.

"GLAD YOU KEPT THE PLACE UP FOR ME. IT'S HIDEOUS. I LOVE IT!"

It wasn't possible. None of this was. It was, after all, a dream, where possible things were generally scarce. Still, it was comparatively more impossible than most.

The only tool in in range Dipper could spot in reach at the moment was a stick. He jabbed the end through the mouth of the marshmallow snake while simultaneously trying to stomp on the tail. He wasn't sure if he succeeded, because he hadn't stopped to look. He was a bit too preoccupied with gaping at the shape in the sky to check.

"You're not here. You can't exist anymore!" Dipper shouted at Bill, as if insisting on fact would make him disappear.

"DON'T BE SO NEGATIVE, KID. CAN'T LET A LITTLE ERASURE FROM REALITY GET YOU DOWN. I INVITED SOME FRIENDS OVER. WHICH I HAVE, HERE. UNLIKE YOU. HERE. YOU SHOULD MEET SOME."

In the place of what would have been the sun, a white eye blinked open overhead. The remaining clouds burst in one last, unified flame, only to char and disintegrate into feet, hands and other disembodied appendages with tinier googly eyes and scraggly fangs sprouting haphazardly from wherever they happened to fit.

Without anywhere obvious to turn, Dipper instead tried duck. He flattened himself to level with the blinking rainbow-brown grass. The moment he came into contact with the blades, the triangles cracked. The ground opened up as shattered ice would to a frozen lake, except, instead of water, it gave way into a giant mass of gelatin.

The gelatin waved over Dipper as he sank into its depths. Dipper writhed to swing an arm towards his mouth, so he could at least get some air. Instead, he got a mouth full of lemon-lime flavoring.

Before he could so much as blink, the triangle in the sky shrunk and appeared in front of him in the familiar form of a small, floating flat pyramid. "I MEAN, YOU PINES WEREN'T DUMB ENOUGH TO THINK THE UNIVERSE IS ALONE, RIGHT?"

A disembodied foot, two ears and an elbow, all with tinier stick limbs of their own, fell into the jello beside the two of them. The foot smacked Dipper's head enough to knock Wendy's old hat from his head.

A second Bill appeared by Dipper's newly separated hat. He grabbed it and placed it over his top hat. "HAH. THAT'S NOT EVEN PART OF YOUR BODY. HAT POSER." The second Bill vanished, and melded with the first one, complete with the first speaking Bill, complete with Dipper's hat. "ANYWAY. THERE ARE MILLIONS OF POSSIBLE WORLDS. YOU KNOW, LIKE THAT GERMAN SCIENTIST WITH THE DEAD CATS. SURPRISE. I'M IN ALL OF THEM."

The second Bill reappeared directly behind him, or so he presumed. Dipper couldn't turn far enough to see him. He could only catch the sliver of a shining gold shape as its emanated light fragmented through the sticky green sea. "OR MAYBE STANLEY'S STUPID BRAIN COMING BACK BROUGHT ME BACK. OR MAYBE I HAVE A TWIN, TOO."

The first Bill piped up again. "THAT'S BILLY, I'M BILSON!"

Having at least come to the conclusion that he could, for whatever reason, still breathe inside jello, Dipper tried to raise a leg and lower his foot at the same time, to dig a pathway he could move through. His flail was interrupted first by the thick mass of the gelatin not budging, and then by the flashing appearance of countless Bills, of varying sizes and styles of headwear, cluttering the plane of existence with a yellow glow.

"DIPPER PINES."

"IAJR BR TJSRE, WSYR GP. XWAP YGIE PIESAEIGB."

Dipper tried to writhe away from Bill and out of the jello pocket trap. He succeeded in, if nothing else, knocking himself in the back of the head. He flinched, and a light "oof" involuntarily sputtered from him. The world in front of him vanished. It refocused in the faint shades of black dusted with the yellow outline of a bathroom night-light.

The water of the shower running on cold smacked against Dipper's face, down the collar of his already soaked pjs. Chunks of disintegrating tissue paper stuck to most of him, including, somehow, his mouth and nose. He coughed a wad of paper into his hand.

"What?"

Aside from the perpetual rush of dripping shower water, for that first second, the entire house was the sort of silent best reserved for libraries and cemeteries. The absence of the billowing wind, or the Bill associated with it, was so overwhelmingly quiet, the word still felt appropriate by comparison even when someone pounded on the door.

"Dipper?"

"Aah—" Dipper sprung back. He tried to grab the shower curtain, only to slip on the tub floor and lean the other way.

"Not that I'd ever not approve of you trying to not stink, but this maybe kind of isn't the best time to shower? That is a shower whoosh, right?" Mabel asked through the door.

"Y-yeah. I," Dipper grabbed both knobs to turn the water off. It wasn't until he was holding the right handle that he noticed his hand was trembling. He tried to ignore it. "Just nervous, you know, about—" Dipper considered what it was he was nervous about, and second, third and fourth guessed each possibility as thoroughly as four seconds would allow. "first day of school?"

It didn't feel right to bother Mabel with this, not when he knew she was finally excited for school again, and how he could easily be psyching himself out. People did have nightmares without them including trans-dimensional chaos creatures.

Dipper could hear her bouncing on the other side of the door "I know! New friends. New outfits. Picking our classes. Spontaneous fully choreographed group hallway dance numbers. Think of the possibilities."

"I promise that isn't and will never be what I'm thinking."

"You mean, you didn't get new clothes? Don't tell me you're still wearing that vest tomorrow, or the hat. I don't think they allow hats in high school. It's in the orientation booklet, between halter tops and knives."

Dipper suppressed a sigh, tried to sound at least somewhat awake, and dismissed it. "I can take off a hat. It's fine."

"You sure you're OK in there? Didn't get up and eat that leftover pizza, did you? It's like pepperoni poodle always says, pizza after ten, you're getting up again," she teased.

"No," Dipper reached around the shower curtain. He swatted around the darkness until he found the hand towel, pulled it into the shower and smacked it to his face. In the dim light, his imagination made the flecks of paper look like a triangle staring back.

"No, you're not a pizza cat burglar or no you're not OK?"

Dipper held the towel as far from himself as his arms would stretch. "It's nothing." Both. It was both.

Having a nightmare about Bill Cipher now was the same as about on par with having a nightmare about being chased by a chainsaw wielding ghost dragon in clown makeup. It was an irrational fear about something that didn't and couldn't exist. Cryptic last threat or not, Bill was gone.

Dipper tried to tell himself that was right, yet, as much as he wanted to, he wasn't sure if he could believe himself.

An awkward silence so long he wasn't sure if Mabel had left or not later, he finally admitted it. "I had a nightmare. About, that."

Mabel's voice hushed and softened with an instant understanding of which formal noun he'd replaced with 'that'. "Are you dressed in there?"

The question was so sudden and so seemingly off-topic that it drew a blink from Dipper. "Uh. Yes. I'm wet, though. Should I ask why, or, you—"

"Don't care. Awkward sibling hug time." Mabel shoved open the door, which, to Dipper's surprise, he must have not locked in his sleepwalk to the bathroom. She wrapped both a larger bath towel and her arm around his shoulders in a quick, barely-brushing hug.

Mabel had made it to verbalizing the first "pat" when she retracted a now soggy, paper-covered hand with a startled "eeew." She reached back to turn on a light switch, and took in the sight of her own splotched palm. "What is this?"

"Too bright." Dipper, meanwhile, flinched at the sudden influx of light so much, he stopped staring at the towel and instead used it to cover his face. "Also, paper."

Mabel shook her hand out, or so Dipper assumed, based on the sudden flapping noises. "What were you doing in the shower with paper? Bath-time origami?"

Dipper gave the only answer he had left to offer; an honest, muffled statement into a towel. "I don't know."


	2. One-Girl Breakfast Theater

"First day of school. Gonna be so cool. Not gross as drool. Also not eating gruel," Mabel rhymed into the bathroom mirror.

If enthusiasm was contagious, Mabel and her rainbow infinity loop sweater would've been patient zero. Unfortunately, Dipper's limbs were noodle-limp, and he was somehow experiencing the sensation of his eyes sinking through his skull and out the other side. He could hardly bring himself to scrub his face.

It didn't matter too much that he was being quiet, though. Mabel was plenty preoccupied with free-styling her first day of school theme song. "Think they've got a pool. Which is a swimming… tool. No, nay, no, rules with spools, I'm no fool 'bout school."

Dipper scratched behind his ear. A shriveled speck of notebook paper scraped off. He mumbled at the fleck on his fingernail. "Seriously, what could've involved paper in the shower?"

Before the question could become rhetorical, Mabel poked her head into Dipper's half of the bathroom counter-space. "Whatcha worried about there? All your messy hair?" she paused for a second with a minor epiphany."Whoa, I'm still rhyme-timing."

"It's not— I saw, or, I didn't-" Dipper stumbled to rephrase, since their parents could walk by at any second. "You know."

"Oh, the lost battle of paper-mache? That's nothing." Mabel pawed her hair brush at Dipper's shoulder with more force than she'd likely intended, as it made him bob forward with a light 'oof'. "Though you do kinda look like you're molting. New trick?"

"It's feathers that molt," he corrected reflexively.

"I said _kind of_. Wait," Mabel paused to gasp at her own idea, complete with pushing her hands against her cheeks in playful shock. "People might think you shave!"

"What?"

Dipper started to back away from Mabel and, by extension, the mirror. While he was mid-pivot, from the corner of his eye, his reflection seemed to lag behind him. His face should have been in profile, yet the image in the mirror was staring straight ahead. He turned back to the mirror to investigate.

Mabel, meanwhile, had gone back to brushing her hair. "If you cut yourself shaving, you stick a tissue on it. You know, so you don't bleed too much awesome out and stain the bath rug," she explained.

By that point, Dipper was too preoccupied to register what Mabel was saying, so he agreed with a thoughtless "yeah". He raised his hand towards the mirror and strummed his fingers against the glass. His reflection followed suit, but with a split-second delay. The closer he drew, the more obvious the lag became. Just as he was getting a sense for the pattern, the reflection of his hand blurred into a single, circular lump.

Dipper frantically waved to flag Mabel's attention. "Do you see this?"

"You mean your jazz hand? Yeah, it sure is wiggly."

He waved at the image again, more drastically this time. "No, the mirror!"

"Yep. That's a mirror. Why? Did you spit on it?"

"What? No. It's not me. Well. It is me, sort of. In the mirror. Except. Look—"

When Dipper tuned back to check his own reflection, the image had warped further. Specifically, its pupils had thinned into slits, and his eyes were emitting a yellow-green glow. The reflection drew closer, as if pressing against the edge of the glass. "YOUR HEAD SURE IS COZY. SAY, HOW MUCH WOULD YOU CHARGE FOR RENT IN BEAR EYES?"

Dipper screamed and scrambled back from the mirror. He tripped against the shower curtain, which snagged and wrapped around him as might an exceptionally colorful cocoon. He wriggled his way back upright.

"Dipper! What are you doing? Use mouth words!" Mabel turned her back to the mirror. She offered a hand out to Dipper, while still holding her brush. She soon realized this mistake and went to put it down. "Oh. Whoops. Captain Brush-Hand strikes again."

The reflection of himself, as far as Dipper could see it, had barely moved with him. Instead, it had stayed in the forefront of the mirror. Its mouth wasn't moving, but one could still hear its muffled, booming, incomprehensible gibberish. "AH. WENA ESIR I SESREVINU SSORCA SKCARC EHT NI."

The reflection raised both of its hands towards the edge of the mirror, as if to smash the glass. Without any time to think, Dipper threw a hand towel at the mirror. He tried to shove Mabel out of the way. "Get down!"

Mabel, meanwhile, veered sideways to avoid Dipper's tackle. The only way in which she seemed disturbed was in annoyance with him. "Hey! I need counter-space, too, or my beauty sleep won't be beauty-waking."

"No. Not that. It's—" By the time Dipper had reoriented enough to point at the mirror, his reflection had reverted to normal, regular-colored eyes and all.

Mabel just shook her head. "Did you not sleep at all? Again? Oh, your poor shirts. The laundry never stood a chance."

Dipper didn't have the chance to elaborate before their father interrupted by shouting up the stairs. "Mabel! Dipper! Quick, pancakes are attacking and you're our only hope!"

Both Mabel and Dipper stopped what they were doing to shout back in unison. "Coming!"

Mabel pressed her hair brush to her chest. She whispered "your sacrifice will be remembered" to it, and then chucked the brush at Dipper's head. "Use him well!"

Dipper tried to snatch the brush in mid-air, but missed. The brush instead brushed his shoulder. "Bu—Mabel—"

"I'll get you extra-strength Mabel juice, stat. Doctor Mabel, away!" The bathroom door slammed shut behind Mabel. It rattled with the residual force. Dipper could hear an oink and frantic footsteps pattering away along with her increasingly distant shouting. "Dad! Save some for Waddles! He wants his with beets."

Alone in the bathroom, Dipper stared at his reflection and saw nothing but himself. He picked up his toothbrush and pressed the bottom into his cheek. His reflection did the same. "Mirror. Mirrors. Did anything live in mirrors? That weren't silver?" he tried to remember. The reflection, in typical reflection fashion, had no answers for Dipper that he himself hadn't come up with. "How would this—?"

"Dipper, hurry! We need reinforcements. Also, there's a package for you. I'm not above holding mail hostage," his dad called again.

"Just a second!" Dipper stared down the image of himself one more time, looking for an answer that he didn't seem to have. He stuffed his hat over his head and started towards the door.

He made it a single step before nearly tripping on the hand towel he'd thrown earlier. He picked the towel up, set it on the towel rack, and then headed downstairs.

By the time Dipper was in view of the kitchen, his parents and Mabel were all situated at the table. Their dad was wearing an apron with a crudely drawn glitter-glue unicorn on it, which Mabel had given him for father's day when they were six. Their mother was in a suit and pearls, and was reading from her phone. Waddles was munching from his bowl beneath said table. Someone, presumably Mabel, had dropped a pancake on top of his food pile. A separate plate of pancakes and a glass of sparkling pink juice with an umbrella in it were laid out by the open seat for him.

His mom put down her phone once she heard him on the bottom stair. "Are you alright? Mabel mentioned you were up late."

Dipper tugged down at his hat. He tried to sound as normal as possible without quite making eye contact. "Fine, mom. Fine as ever."

Mabel stabbed her fork into the heart of her pancake stack. "He realized tiny owls could live in his hair. If only he could find an owl real estate agency," she joked.

Their dad cracked a smile. "Sounds like a hoot."

Their mom, conversely, tilted her head at Dipper and seemed to take Mabel's comment semi-seriously. "Well, it does look a little shaggy. We could always go to the barber..." She reached a hand towards Dipper's head.

Dipper backed away with his palms outstretched before his mom could reach him. "No! Not. I'm fine."

"Alright..." His mom nodded in what he expected was supposed to be understanding, but sounded too composed to convey the thought. "It's ok to be nervous about school, if you are. You're more ready than you think."

Dad pulled out the empty chair beside the one remaining full plate. Dipper took the seat. His dad nodded back in acknowledgement. "No inspirational speeches, here. Just pancakes."

"Warm and fluffy, best just there is!" Mabel stabbed her fork through half of a pancake. She slid against her chair under the table with as little subtlety as one could, and offered her fork to Waddles with a wink.

Dipper braced to eat. He tried to paste on an eager smile, but half of his face responded better than the other, and the resulting expression ultimately had more in common with a Picasso portrait than normal human smile. He tried to at least delude himself into not thinking he looked as anxious as he felt, and glanced back to his dad. "Didn't you say something about a package?"

"Oh, yeah. Your uncle said you forgot something. Now, where'd I put that thing?" Dad stood up, letting the majesty of the glitter-glue rainbow glory unfold in full. He paced to survey the room.

Meanwhile, Mabel had taken the opportunity to seize as much of their mom's attention as possible. "Can I go to the mall after school?"

Mom was back on her phone while she answered with a question. "Hm. Maybe. What do you need, exactly?"

"To do teenager stuff. Waddles and I've gotta find a posse."

Mom was spared from having to answer too quickly by their dad interjecting. "Hun, where'd we put that envelope, again?"

"It's under the island, dear." Their mom looked back to Mabel, and tried to put on a veil of sympathy, just in case Mabel wasn't kidding. "Sweetie, I don't think they allow pigs at the mall. Even if there are some there metaphorically."

Mabel rocked back in her chair. She pressed her hand against her chest as if she was over-dramatically wounded. "Waddles is a teen at heart. He can't let having tiny hair stop him from getting a perm. It's an inspiration!" She stopped to gobble another bite of pancake.

The Mabel's One Girl Breakfast Theater experience was interrupted by the re-emergence of one package-holding dad. He set a parchment-covered package down in front of Dipper with a pat to the cover. "Here it is. One Oregonian package."

Dipper swallowed his last bite, and told his dad an anticipatory "thanks" before picking up the parcel. He opened the box with no recollection of what he could have forgotten. His brain froze at the sight.

Inside the box, there was was a maroon leather journal with a gold hand-print emblazoned on the cover. At first glance, it was nearly identical to the one he'd treasured all summer. Upon closer inspection, there were two major differences. The hand was emblazoned with the number one, and the golden hand print was much smaller, with only five fingers.

Dipper rushed to remove the book from its bubble-wrapped bindings. A packing slip fluttered out across the table. He reached out to snatch the receipt just before it could fall into his mom's pancake plate. A ten-digit number was scrawled across the back of the slip.

His mom hardly blinked. "Don't get paper in the syrup, Dipper."

"Yeah. Don't want a sticky situation." Mabel sniggered. Three seconds later, their dad snorted into his shirt.

Dipper stuck the receipt back against the last page of the unfamiliar journal. He clutched it towards himself while thoughtlessly agreeing. "Yeah. Sorry. I mean, I will."

"Fantasmic." Mabel scarfed down another pancake chunk.

Dipper propped the journal up between his plate and the edge of the table. The first page of the notebook had been filled in, and only that page, in Ford's handwriting. Within the first word, Dipper was far too absorbed in reading to notice any more idle morning chatter.

 _September 2nd,_

 _Upon further consideration, it has occurred to me that Stanley and I may not be able to cover every hot-spot for unusual phenomena on our own. Furthermore, there may be more commonplace peculiarities which could be equally deserving of an astutely informed account such as yours. With this in mind, I have stopped at the post office before our expedition to send this to you._

 _In the instance that you may see fit to do so, Dipper, I bequeath to you this first journal to chronicle your findings, supernatural or otherwise. Record your thoughts with the utmost caution, not only with the intent to satiate your own curiosity, but for the betterment of the world. Although we may be apart now, do not forget that as family, we are also always a part of each other._

 _In addition, I have enclosed the contact number for my recently obtained cell phone, which should be able to reach me_ _whenever Stan and I are investigating within range of the proper transmission satellites. Please pass this number on to Mabel as well, and tell her that you are both welcome to call for anything at any time. May your questions lead to answers you deserve. - Your Great Uncle Ford_

Dipper wondered if he should have told Ford before leaving that he'd already started his own journal. He'd bought and decorated a blank book with a tree on the cover. Regardless, the gesture meant enough that he'd need to switch. It was such a coincidence for Ford to have had such a similar idea at the same time that Dipper felt like there had to be a reason. Something was missing. Maybe there was a reason Ford expected they could run into weirdness this far away from the magnet.

Dipper leafed through the journal for a trace of some hidden code or passage stowed inside. Nothing appeared to be there. That didn't mean nothing was, however. There were plenty of ways to hide a message from prying eyes that Ford could use and reasonably expect Dipper to find. He had started to reach for his his phone, only for him to halt when he realized realize that the kitchen was oddly silent. He jerked back from the book to see that everyone else had already left the table. Mabel was in the car. Mom was standing by the key rack, reading on her phone again. Dad was washing dishes by the window.

He didn't have long, but he couldn't bare not trying at least one way to reveal an invisible message. With that in mind, as silently as one could sprint, Dipper rushed to the stove. He twisted the flame on the lowest possible setting, raised up the journal, and held the pages a cautious but still close proximity to the flame. There were a few types of invisible ink, and two of the more common ones, lemon juice and milk, would both expose under a sufficiently high temperature.

Dipper stood over the flame for a good half a minute before his dad finally noticed him. His dad watched him with passing nonchalance that indicated he was surprisingly unfazed by this. "I never thought I'd need to tell you, but, no book-burnings in the house, please."

"Not burning. Revealing hidden messages."

"Ah. Well, mine _are_ usually too obvious."

The horn honked from the driveway. Mom, who was now in the car with Mabel, was leaning so far against the steering wheel that her forehead was almost against the windshield. Mabel was deliberately pressing her face against the side window to make her nose squish into a snout. She nuzzled Waddles through the glass while squealing "pig kisses!"

Finding messages would have to wait.

Dipper turned the stove off. He flipped through the pages of the journal for a sign, but nothing new was there. He shut the journal, grabbed his book-bag, and rushed for the door with a "bye" to his dad-only for him to double back to the refrigerator and grab a bottle of grape juice. He flashed the label at his dad with the explanation "reveals a solution of baking soda" as he left.

As quickly as was possible without tripping over himself, Dipper sprinted to the car. He slid into the backseat and immediately cracked open the journal. Blank as the book might have been, the pages were comfortably warm in his hands.

The car purred to life. Mabel turned in the front passenger seat so that her chin was against the top of the back rest. She peered down on Dipper from her newfound domain. "So, what'd you forget?"

"Nothing."

"Pretty big nothing. C'mon." She flicked her wrist over the seat, dismissing his denial. "I know your browser history~"

Spoken in sing-song or not, it was a serious enough threat for Dipper to just tell her. "New journal."

She paused to consider what he was saying. "You lost the tree one in the forest?"

"No. Ford sent one," Dipper told her. Mabel sent him a scrunched look, one which implied she was questioning if he had thrown the original journal away as promised. He shook his head. "Not that. Different one. For normal journal stuff."

"Oh," her smile rebounded with a hint of teasing. "You mean a boy diary."

Dipper clutched the pages to himself defensively, wrinkling the open book. "It's not a diary. It's research."

"Research to the depths of your loop-a-doop-ness. What if I drew penguins on it? Then it'd be a diary."

"This is serious, Mabel."

"Diaries are serious. That's why they have locks! Besides, in California rules, diaries kick journals' book-spined butts. They can have kittens on them! When's the last time you saw puppies on a journal? Now, diaries, I can get fifteen kinds of puppies on a diary. Or kittens. They could even be both. I'll call them kippies!"


	3. Triangulation

As of three seconds ago, the first homeroom of Dipper's high school life had started, and he'd hardly noticed. The teacher was reciting names for roll call, starting with "Andy Abernathy", in precisely the right monotone to be drowned out by any noise whatsoever. Dipper was slouching over his new journal. He scrawled his sprawling thoughts across the pages in an effort to find some semblance of sense within them.

It wasn't entirely working.

 _September 4th,_

 _I've checked this journal under fire, grape-juice, a scratch test and a blacklight. No hidden messages from Ford. He didn't answer his phone, either._

 _I'm freaking out!_

 _Getting rid of the old journals was supposed to help, but I can't remember what Ford wrote about how dimensions worked. Bill was in my head while I was sleeping, or maybe not. I think I saw him this morning, too. Stan's memories were still there enough for them to start coming back when he saw Mabel's scrapbook. If that's because they weren't fully erased, then it's possible that Bill wasn't erased all the way, either. If that's what's going on, we need to go back to Gravity Falls? Maybe? The zodiac is still there._

 _I heard Bill say something about us Pines not knowing about other universes. I'm pretty sure Ford mentioned being IN other universes in the journals, so how would that be true? Or did Ford only ever talk about dimensions? Is there a difference between other dimensions and multiple universes, even?_ _If there's not, then, maybe I'm imagining this. Or would Bill not know Ford knew about parallel universes along with the dimension stuff, since Ford could stop Bill from seeing his thoughts by then?_

 _If Bill is here, is me trying to figure this out giving him what he needs?_

 _I don't know!_

 _Could it even be Bill in the first place? Even if he is alive, he still shouldn't be able to get past the weirdness magnet. Should I even be writing his name?_

 _I don't know! Well, the name should be fine. Or we'd also be doomed by US economics._

Dipper was distracted from his frantic scribbling by muffled chatter. Mabel and one of her school friends, Felicia Singh, were sitting behind and diagonally from him, respectively. Felicia's hair was done in two small buns which, at one point in his life, Dipper had suspected were hiding horns. Otherwise, she gave off an understated skater-gamer-girl vibe, if said skater's hoodie had fallen into a paper shredder. Like most of the students, Mabel and Felicia were giving only the most precursory focus to the nigh-infinite name list, and were instead engrossed in catching up.

"I'd never thought I'd be thankful for school, but, ugh. Circus camp. The clowns. Why are there people who want to be clowns. I think I've got a phobia of pie, now. Can you do that? Be afraid of pie?" Felicia shuddered.

"You can be afraid of anything you want to be. That's freedom." Mabel answered with an encouraging nod. "Normally if pie's tormenting me, it's because it's before dinner."

Felicia wrapped her arms around herself defensively. "I don't want to, I just am. You couldn't tell the whipped cream from the merengue. Bananas from lemons. A graveyard of yellow."

Mabel kicked her feet under her desk to an inaudible beat. "Feels, if you ever get any pie trouble, come to me. I'll protect you. Trust me. I'm wanted in at least eight bakeries."

"Why?"

"For eating pies. They're there to be defeated. Like mountain climbing, except delicious."

Dipper tried to mentally shake the conversation off and went back to writing.

 _Mabel's chatting with her friends. I can't concentrate. How did Ford draw dimensions, again? I think they were flat, with a portal being a kind of funnel between them. Is there a difference between dimensions and universes?_

"Did you see Jackson Taylor, yet? He got so pale. And dreamy. I heard he died everything he owns black in a vat of infinite darkness. He put it in a painting bucket," Felicia chirped. The sound was so thoroughly high pitched, there was a distinct possibility that had she made that same noise inside of a pet store, the parakeets would answer before the people did.

Dipper's pen stopped scratching. He glanced back up towards the two girls ahead, unwillingly distracted.

Mabel gestured to clap her hands together in silence, the sound of impact being muffled by her floppy sweater sleeveless . "Well, photo-sensitive is the second-best sensitive there is. After, y'know, emotions."

"Maybe he's both. He should write poetry."

Mabel pawed her sweater-sleeve at Felicia's shoulder. "You should talk to him. He might be all," she set her hand over her heart in fake woe "'Your glimmering eyes pierce me, achingly stunning as sunlight's sting.'"

Felicia's head shrunk into her shoulders in a way best likened to a turtle. "Correction, you should write poetry for him and pretend it's for me."

"Anything for love, my love. You are a golden football I'll catch forever."

"Frederick O'Neil?" The teacher called, either ignorant to or deliberately ignoring the students.

Taking advantage of the teacher's obliviousness, Dipper slipped his phone out under his desk. He typed a few keywords into search, 'dimensions versus universes', and started scrolling through whatever article summaries would load. After a few moments of consideration, he went back to the journal.

 _The internet says yes, there's a difference. Most people use them the same way, but, dimensions are layered on top of each other horizontally. If you go to a high enough dimension, then you can hop sideways instead of just going up or down, and move into parallel universes, which are separated vertically. Dimensions don't need to have anything in common with each other aside from the kind of space they exist in, but universes are sort of similar to each other. So there'd also be different versions of each dimension in a parallel universe. Latitude and longitude for the multiverse!_

Dipper drew a couple of circles, layered on top of each other. He crossed through the circle with multiple intersecting lines, dividing it as one might look at a chopped onion. He added an arrow pointing to the doodle with the caption ' _Like this except 1000x everything that exists?'_

The teacher cleared her throat. "Mabel Pines?"

Mabel sprung from her seat in a distinctly jack-in-the-box-like fashion. She waved broadly. "Me! A gift and present!"

Dipper started to look up, then checked back on the notebook. He drew another arrow into the center of the sphere, and drew a question mark at the opposite end with the caption ' _maybe a realm, since I DEFINITELY remember that was different from either of them.'_

"...noted." The teacher pushed her glasses up along the bridge of her nose to disguise what may have been disdain, or possibly befuddlement. She referred back to the list. "Mason Pines?"

Dipper was still staring at his makeshift diagram of the multiverse when he heard his name. It took so long for him to pull away from the journal that by the time he finally stated that he was "here", Mabel had started pointing at him and had answered the teacher in unison with him.

Mabel cupped her other hand to her mouth and called towards the front of the room. "Call him Dipper. We'd have him change legally if we weren't afraid he'd be name-sued by sauce!" The couple of kids who didn't know the Pines from Piedmont Middle had sent their questioning glances to Mabel rather than to him. Still, Dipper seized the excuse to scrunch down from sight a bit.

The teacher's eyebrow raised incredulously. "...Dipper?"

Dipper's head snapped right back up at his nickname. "Yeah?"

"...Alright, then." Unknowingly, the reflexive response had proven his point. The teacher blinked once, marked something on her check-list, and moved on. "Kara Prince?"

With the eyes of authority safely off of him, Dipper turned his focus back to the journal. He'd made it as far as writing a single sentence, " _Parallel universes have different versions of the same beings living across them, I think, but it doesn't seem like dimensions would,"_ before his racing ideas stalled once more, and he was forced to think. He stared down at the pages so intensely, the words themselves seemed to blur.

Dipper was so deeply engrossed in said thoughts that he failed to notice that he was chewing on his vest. He did, however, notice when Mabel kicked the back of his chair enough to knock him forward. The soggy vest collar sputtered out of his mouth. Dipper scrambled to hide the pages of the journal and turned around.

The instant that he looked to her, Mabel lifted up her notebook. She flashed him an intricate doodle in multicolored gel pens. She pointed at the sketch with the most enthusiasm a whisper would allow. "Look, it's me. On a pegasus. I call her Peggy."

"Not in class, Mabel," Dipper whispered back.

Felicia leaned diagonally across her desk, so she could also face Dipper. She cupped both of her hands under her chin and squinted at him in scrutiny. "Did you get taller?"

Dipper frantically shook his head. He raised a finger to his mouth in a brief shushing gesture before ducking back into the journal.

Felicia answered a bit too loudly for it to count as a whisper anymore. "Bummer."

"We could always try heels," Mabel chimed back.

Felicia slouched. She looked back to Mabel. "My mom won't let me buy them. She says they promote sexist beauty standards and make people easy to rob."

Mabel looked sympathetic. "But if Cinderella wrote glass sneakers, what would she leave to find her? Her prince's broken heart? Business cards?"

"Business cards might be easier, though."

"Point, glass sneakers."

Dipper shook the inane chatter off. He picked up his pen and stared down at the cluttered page, allowing the shapes around him to blur into the background. For one moment, they did. It didn't last long.

Within a single blink, the golden yellow glint of Felicia's triforce earrings started to blur into a one-eyed, top-hatted, out-of-focus triangle shouting at him. "HEY, PINE TREE. SINCE YOU DITCHED THAT HAT, CAN'T CALL YOU PINE TREE ANYMORE. HM. WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT LUMBER LAD?"

Dipper braced to shout back, only to recognize that he was in the middle of class, and frantically stuff his arm into his mouth to muffle himself. He squirmed with the stifled yell.

Having spotted the odd wiggling, Mabel flopped over the back of her chair towards Dipper. Felicia looked at them both quizzically. "…What's wrong with him, now?"

When she moved, Felicia's earring swayed. In Dipper's mental context, the rocking was a mocking sway. Dipper tried to take a breath through his sleeve. Just as he was ready to speak up, Bill taunted over him. "WARM WELCOME TO INSANITY, LITTLE LADLE. I HEAR YOU FOUND YOUR COMPLIMENTARY BOUT OF MENTAL SCREAMING."

Mabel gave her best shrug to Felicia. "I think he's hungry and your earrings look like fancy nachos."

"PICK UP A SECOND ONE NOW, IT'S HALF OFF YOUR LIFE SPAN."

The end-of-period rang across the room. The sudden noise made Dipper jolt, which, in turn, made him bite down on his arm. He quickly retracted his arm from his mouth with an "ow" and tried to shake off the throbbing.

By the time he had reoriented to the uproar of the classroom, Felicia was already halfway to the door. Her earrings were safely obscured by her hair. What glimpses he could see of them had gone back to resembling the three tiny, gold, inanimate triangles that they were. Clearly, she'd not heard anything unusual, since she was chatting away with Mabel still. "I'm in art next. You?"

Mabel flipped her binder to show her laminated class schedule, which she propped up on top of her head. "Earth science! Pop quiz, where are we?" she pointed to Felicia.

Felicia paused. "School?"

"Hooray, Felicia! Also right, earth."

Felicia stepped out the door, only to stop and check back when she noticed that Mabel was still inside of the classroom. They exchanged a second of questioning glances before Felicia shrugged goodbye. "See you at lunch, Mabel."

"Bye, Feels!" Mabel pivoted where she stood, twirling so she was now facing Dipper directly. "And I'll see YOU," she poked his shoulder. Dipper jumped upright with an indistinct squeaking noise. "When you board the one-way brain train leaving cuckoo-ville. What's wrong, bro-bro?"

Dipper turned to check the classroom. Only the exceptionally disinterested homeroom teacher was still lingering around. As far as safe spaces went, it wasn't going to get much more secure anytime soon, and someone else had to know what was going on.

"I saw him watching me."

"Which him? There was almost half a room of hims in there."

Dipper clutched the journal. He drew closer to Mabel, so he could keep his voice down and still be easily heard. "Bill. He was in Felicia's earring. Being her earring. The center was his eye. It was right there, I-"

"Oh." Mabel paused awkwardly, likely unsure what to do with this information. It took her a second before she clapped her hands together with an idea. "Well. Uh. Then no more triangles for you, today. We're quitting, cold turkey. And finding that turkey a blanket."

The minuscule specks of enthusiasm Dipper had left in him faded. "You want me to quit... shapes?"

"Not all of them. Just the ones with three sides."

"My sixth period is geometry."

"Then how about a blindfold? There's one in my backpack. It's got googly eyes on it. From far away, you'll look awake. And easily distracted." Mabel flung her backpack off of her shoulder to fish through it. Sure enough, she pulled out a black blindfold with two giant craft eyes hot glued to the front.

"...You brought a blindfold to school?"

"I borrowed it from Grunkle Stan. Never know when you'll meet a rogue piñata."

"This isn't a birthday party. It's-"

Before Dipper could get any more worked up, Mabel shook him by both shoulders. She pushed him into the hallway. "It's exactly how things were before. Remember before summer? You'd see the soccer coach had belly button lint, freak out over nothing, and suddenly you're sure she's some moth lady from Mars eating my sweaters to survive. This is that." The googly eyes rattled in her grasp.

"That was different. This-it's real."

"Yeah, real disturbing." Mabel reached out to tie the blindfold over Dipper's eyes. Dipper tried to back away, but she managed to stretch far enough to pull the fabric into a sloppy knot around his head. "You're seeing stuff because you're looking for it, not because it's here. So, if you can't stop looking, stop seeing. Ta-da, problem paused."

Dipper wedged a finger under the blindfold. He lifted it enough that he could still see her. "Thanks. This is... incredibly not helpful."

A different voice mumbled behind the both of them with the absolute minimum of an inflection. "I made a piñata out of plastic bags, once. I think I wanted to hit something with a bat and be rewarded."

Dipper stepped back and yanked the blindfold the rest of the way off to see another of Mabel's friends staring in his general direction. He couldn't remember her name. He could, however, see that she had bright red pigtails, was dressed like she'd been buried aliv in ththe Edgy on Purpose stockroom and had mistaken highlighters for laundry detergent.

"It's ok. I'm afraid of escalators." The girl clutched both of her hands in front of her, as if on the verge of bowing. "If you fell down an up escalator, you could fall forever. Theoretically."

"Uh..."

Dipper was given very little time to question what type of escalators this girl must have encountered before Mabel bounced straight between them. "Oh my gosh, Xandra. I didn't know you'd be here, too. You just missed Felicia! She had to go learn stuff." Mabel yanked Xandra by the arm and pulled her ahead through the hall.

Xandra stumbled to stay in step. "I didn't know, either. About being here. I'd assumed about the learning. Clerical error made my homeschool license lapse. How was your summer?" she asked with the minimum affect to pass as being conscious.

"I'm amazing. Fantastic. Amaze-tacular. And you?"

"Horrible. Wishing the dress code allowed PJs."

With Mabel's attention now absorbed by an external force, Dipper lagged behind. He tried to get some distance, yet he could still hear the two rambling inanely down the hallway.

"What class're you in, next? We're in Earth Science, then History," Mabel asked.

"Metaphorically, we're all in tomorrow's History. My class schedule says science, though."

Mabel threw her hands into the air. "Woo, science buddies!"

Dipper tried to take a mental step back along with the physical ones. "Don't freak out. You're awake," he mumbled to himself as he strode towards his next class. "Real or not, he can't do anything."


	4. Hall Pass Katamari Ball

Ten minutes into first period Earth Science, and so far, no one had physically died. A few may have died mentally, but they were doing a good job of passing as self-aware. A stack of textbooks was being passed across the room.

The teacher, a curly-haired, bespectacled woman identified on the blackboard as a Ms. Blithers, was blathering to the class. "While we wait for our books, does anyone want to guess what forces may cause a continent to change over time?" she asked.

While someone else was answering, "uhm, water?", Dipper was passed his copy of the class textbook. He set the book in the corner of his desk and tried to maintain some semblance of concentration.

The instant the cover left his line of sight, the mountain on the cover morphed from a jagged rock into a smooth pyramid. Its color flashed from gray to yellow. His eyes shifted reflexively towards the flicker. A voice sounded in his head in much the same way he would have heard his own thoughts; inaudible, yet inherently understood. "BETTER QUESTION. IF I WANT TO SHISH-KABOB SHEEP, WHICH SHOULD I IMPALE THEM ON, STALACTITES OR STALAGMITES? HERE'S A HINT—THE SHEEP ARE A BAD METAPHOR FOR BAD METAPHORS. ALSO, FOR PEOPLE."

Dipper choked on the air. A few of his classmates started. When he shifted upright, the cover of the textbook had faded back to as innocuous an exceptionally large rock could get. He shrunk into his seat.

An hour later, in second period history, Dipper was staring off at a medieval tapestry when the space between the two strings tinted from the ivory of the wall to golden yellow. There was no eye visible, yet, in his head, Dipper could feel something staring towards the history teacher. "HER HAIR SHOULD MAKE AN OUROBOROS WITH HER TONGUE. THEN SHE'LL REALLY BE HISTORY."

Dipper wrapped his arms around his head. He fell face-first into his desk.

Forty minutes after that, Dipper was hiding from the rest of the class behind his third-period AP Literature pamphlet. He tapped his pen by the edge of his mouth, deep in thought. The teacher was pointing to a projection on their whiteboard, and had just paused on the name of their first book in the syllabus, Franz Kafka's _The Trial_ , when the screen-saver on her computer flickered from a field of flowers into triangles. "I KNEW MOPEY COUGH BOY. GREAT COCKROACH, BORING HUMAN. TOOK HIM A WHILE TO LISTEN TO A GOOD DELUSION AND DIE."

The sound was so startling that Dipper bit down. The pen burst between his teeth, spurting ink all over him. He choked on the taste and ducked behind his notebook again to spit out chunks of black ink in the most privacy a public school classroom could allow.

By the time Dipper was heading towards his fourth period, his movements were less a walk than a lifeless stagger. His shirt was soaked with ink. Tiny splotches of it still speckled his face, too. Even with the huge crowd of students, the other kids had left a wide birth around Dipper until Mabel spotted him across the cluster.

With a quick wave goodbye, Mabel parted ways from the girls she'd been walking with. She rushed ahead until she was walking in sync with Dipper's plodding. Her head tilted as she fell in step with him, not-so-subtly staring at his shirt. "Invisible octopus attack?"

Dipper was so exhausted he didn't have it in him to question her. "Would be better."

"If only pens weren't so tasty… Hey, I've got a spare sweater in my locker. It's got a bunny in a bunny costume on it."

"It's fine," Dipper denied in such a cracking, unenthusiastic way that it clearly anything but. He rubbed at the smudge on his shirt. "The ink blot test will wash off."

Mabel had either failed to notice this or was choosing to deflect to a distraction. "Those were tests? Then why isn't cloud-watching? I'd so get an A in cloud-watching. Yesterday, I saw a komodo dragon with a birthday cake."

"I think—" Dipper started to explain, only to cut himself off in resignation. "Never-mind. Forget. I forgot, what I forgot."

"I hate when that happens." Mabel nudged her elbow towards the biggest ink stain on his shirt. "Is it just me, or would your splotch be dancing ice cream?"

The two came to a stop in front of the gymnasium. Mabel planted her heels into the ground about five feet away from the boy's locker room. She waved a broad, arching goodbye, "Good luck in your sweat dungeon!", and then darted back towards the girls' side entrance.

She moved so quickly, Dipper hadn't had the chance to tell her "you, too," until she was already out of sight.

Dipper pulled at the bottom of his shirt. He tried not to see the black mark as an omen of something worse. It wasn't working.

Dull chatter blurred around him when Dipper walked into the locker room, forming an almost palpable, audible mush—the way mashed potatoes might sound if they were capable of speaking. The square-shaped, mullet-wearing gym coach was already shouting at the mass of teenage mustiness. "Two minutes to class. Be late, and I'll assume you're ogling each other!"

Dipper made a point of keeping his head down while he scooted past the other boys. He shuffled to his assigned locker and changed clothes as quickly as human limitations would allow. As he reluctantly set his hat up on the center hanger, he stared into the dark abyss of the inside of his locker, and with it, the depths of his own anxieties.

He couldn't take this.

It was like in the journal, when Stanford saw the townsfolk possessed, but worse, because at least back then, it could have logically been happening.

Dipper slammed the locker shut, took out his phone, and marched straight into a bathroom stall. He pressed his back against the graffiti coated wall, cupped his hand over the receiver and dialed Stanford's number. Under his breath, he chanted a desperate mantra of "pick up, pick up…"

The phone rang for the emotional equivalent of forever before shorting into the pre-recorded pleasantries of an automated response. "I'm sorry, but the person you have called was either lazy or didn't care enough to set up their voice mail box. Please try again."

The back of Dipper's head knocked against the locker with a frustrated moan. "No-"

His desperation was interrupted by a rapid knock shaking the bathroom door. "Thirty second warning. If I don't see you in thirty seconds, I'm going to start counting backwards. And I hate backwards numbers!" the coach shouted.

Whether it was a general statement or meant specifically for him, the door made it difficult to tell. Still, the sheer volume of it made Dipper answer directly. "One second." Dipper shoved his phone into his pocket. He opened the stall. His shirt was rumpled, his bangs were so askew that half of his birthmark was showing, and his shoelaces were both untied. He tried to step forward in spite of this, only for the gym teacher to step straight into the stall's doorframe and barricade him in.

"Unholy sh—ute, kid," the coach flinched to correct himself, "Garbage chute. As in, a place for garbage. Which you look like."

"Thanks."

Dipper tried to turn sideways so he could scoot past the teacher. The coach moved along with him with a single second's delay. Still, he left just enough of a gap that Dipper was able to slide out to the other side, albeit narrowly.

Dipper's shoelaces slid under the soles of his sneakers. He tripped across the floor and slid into one of the empty benches a few feet away. He posed against it to inaccurately imply this move was deliberate. It wasn't convincing.

Thanks to the solid, bolted-down object he was now beside, Dipper didn't have a good option on how to back away when the coach reached out for him. The teacher pressed their hand palm-first to Dipper's forehead. "Seems you've got a temperature."

On some level, Dipper knew what the teacher thought he was saying. Still, he was too distracted not to deflect one awkward pseudo-question with another."Well, if it it exists, then, it has measurable degrees of warmth, so, so does everything?"

The coach pulled away. He brandished a deck of pink carbon-copy pages from his belt. His pen clicked open against his arm while he braced to write. "What's your name?"

"Dipper. Pines."

The coach made a note of something. "Can you walk in a straight line for two minutes and not pass out?"

"...yes?"

"Then do. Left, to the nurse. The school district doesn't have the budget to get sued for your dam—p," the coach struggled to fix his intended curse word before continuing, "doctorate degree in warmth. Damp. You're damp. Because you're sweating."

Before any more self-censorship could become necessary, the coach tore the pink slip off his notepad. He pushed the piece of paper into Dipper's chest. Dipper made a second of awkward eye contact with the teacher before recognizing he was supposed to grab it. He picked up the slip of paper and turned it around. It was a coach had selected "possibly contagious" and "annoying me". The pass had been made out to a Skipper Pines.

Before Dipper could point this out, the coach had already barged out into the gym. The door slammed shut behind him. It kept rattling with the reverberation of his muffled voice. "Hey, bratwursts! We're learning football. Lesson one. The ball does not touch your foot, unless you're punting. It's also not foot-shaped!"

Dipper let his hand fall to his side, and the hall pass slide from his grasp. He puttered back to his phone, and stared down upon the empty screen. He plugged in Ford's number, muttered "come on," in escalating disappointment.

The pipes rattled again, evoking a disembodied whisper through the unpleasantly pungent air. The clamor carried straight through the walls, casting the hum across the room's perimeter. Noise encroached from every inch of the room. "Gniyreve syas gnihton tub..."'

Dipper pulled his bag closer. He tried to look for the source of the sound. Instead, he ended up staring through the window to the coach's office. Nothing was there which hadn't been seconds before, at least not visibly. Each booklet seemed as undisturbed as write-ups on ' _Athlete's Foot-How to Defeet Your Fungus Feet_ ' or ' _Puberty: the Civil War of Your Body!_ ' could reasonably aspire to be. The translucent outline of Dipper's own reflection on the window panel swayed uncomfortably back. A lump of uncertainty sprang up his throat.

No matter what he thought might be in front of him, at this exact second, all Dipper truly saw was himself. There was a good chance Mabel had been right, earlier. Nonetheless, he couldn't shake the feeling of being followed.

His hand clutched uncomfortably at his elbow, wringing the fabric. The afterimage of the mirror did the same. Both his residual being and his real self lowered their heads at the uncertain sight of each other. "Hello, eerie gibberish? I'm not sure why I'm expecting you to answer, but, there it went..."

The mouth of his reflection moved along with his, as was to be expected. Less so was the voice that followed, from the direction of the office, without any motion of a mouth or otherwise to indicate what was speaking. "?Em raeh uoy, yob"

A rustle passed through, evoking the atmospheric sound of a wrapping paper katamari ball. Behind his back, the discarded pink hall pass folded into itself, crinkling and crumpling into the curling digits of a deformed origami hand. The ink of his misspelled name seeped through the crease, melting and reforming into a new word on the hand's palm. The hand hovered in mid-air, fingers outstretched, showing a single word. "Stop."

Dipper hadn't intended to listen to instructions from origami, though, when he first saw it, he inadvertently did just that, pausing at the sight. In the following moment, the hand lunged towards his backpack, towards the journal, and Dipper's reflexes reminded him not to take advice from disembodied paper hands.

He slid sideways, narrowly avoiding a swat from the floating hand. His arms and shoulders curled over his book-bag defensively. The index finger scratched his arm with a paper cut. Dipper pulled away further, around a corner, until he spotted the showers by the pool. He remembered how he'd woken up earlier that night. Specifically, he remembered "Water."

The hand hovered after him. Crumpled fingers outstretched, scratching at the nape of his neck. Each attempted scratch cast a new artificial breeze and all-too-real chill along with it.

Dipper sprinted through the row of bathroom stalls, and then past another row of sinks and mirrors. In his peripheral view, the reflection of a person he was passing was clearly not himself. Instead, the being had an ephemeral, monochromic glow. Aside from one small slit for their eyes and a corner for their mouth, every other inch of their body had been covered in bandages. The being pressed its hand along the surface of the mirror, smacking it as one might knock on a door.

Given the origami hand still swiping at him, the most pause Dipper could give this and not get a good paper scratch was to shake his head and look away. "And, possible ghost in the bathroom, again. This says something I'm better off not analyzing forever... except water is a conduit, so, that might make sense, actually," he muttered.

The creature in the mirror kept pounding against the surface with their wrapped palm. What little expression their eyes could show seemed sternly frantic. "!Emoc" The mirror didn't budge. In spite of the school in no way having the budget to make their mirrors silver, it really looked like whatever was in that reflection was stuck in there. If that were true, and it was a ghost, then they couldn't be higher than a category four to be stuck in an image that wasn't a silver mirror.

Still, given that it knew how to use language, Dipper went for the nice option first. "Who needs to make amends? A reckless archaeologist? Tourists with flash photography?" he asked the bandaged figure.

The reflection screamed unintelligibly.

As he was hitting that last word, a paper finger pinched Dipper's ear and twisted. Dipper raised his other hand to grab the hand back. He wrestled with the base of the assaulting fingers, struggling unsuccessfully to tear them away. The struggle sent him circling around repeatedly, all the while striving, and failing, to keep an eye on the mirror.

"Sorry. No time to chat. Now, how-ow-" Dipper tried to speak to the possible ghost. He tore off the top half of a finger on the living hand, only for said fingertip to catch up his nose. Dipper tried to blow it out.

Just as Dipper made it through a pivot to face the mirror image heads-on, the incantation to repel a lower-category ghost snapped back to mind. He forced his way through it in a single revealing breath. "Oh—Exodus demonus, spookus scarus, ainafraidus, no ghostus, bumpus gooses shamalan!"

A wave of negative energy smashed against the mirror. A crackling sound spread across the being's outline, forming a crack along the edge in the exact opposite of what was supposed to happen.

Dipper didn't quite sense the words coming out of him before another self-correction had already spouted out "...or, not."

A human-sized hole tore in the glass behind the reflection of a blue-eyed mummy as it freed itself straight out of the glass. The human-shaped mirror fragments bent as they moved, leaving a spattering of shards in its wake. It lumbered towards him, furious as the youtube comments section for the trailer to the last Ghostbusters movie.

While Dipper's eyes were drawn to the complete disaster on his right, the hovering origami hand had begun to rustle about. What had once been a chart on BMI education had pulled off the wall. The chart wrapped around the base of the hand and sprouted outright, forming first an arm, then an entire paper person. The ink flowed up its arm, swirling into dripping, barely intelligible words across the surface of the being. Only four of the words were remotely legible. "Need", "he", "lies" and "come".

The newly formed arm of the paper being was so close that it snaked under the crack between Dipper's arm and side to swipe at the journal. The pages ruffled in the book, pressing to escape. Dipper wrapped himself around the journal, using his back as a shield towards the paper being.

He kept running.

* * *

Meanwhile, on the girls' side of the gym, the first great war of dodgeball was deep underway. Non-explosive rubber balls were flying through the air. Mabel and Felicia had tucked into the far right corner. Mabel was holding a ball defensively in front of her face, bracing to block any spherical onslaughts with it.

The concentration was shattered by the sound of something shattering. The collision was muffled by padded walls and plastic, but tt was still sudden enough that it made Mabel drop the ball. "Whoa! What was that?"

"What was what?" Felicia asked back.

The second there was no longer a defense in front of her, someone on the evil dodgeball chucked a ball at Mabel. She ducked sideways and down. Felicia caught the ball and tossed it right back.

Mabel picked up her former shield ball with a quick "whoops, there." She brought the ball back to face level and apologized to it, "sorry, ball-face," before letting her head pop over the top of the dodgeball to talk to Felicia directly. She waved her right hand towards the boys' locker room. "I heard boom-boom, wrawr. There. Like tiny plumbing dinosaurs."

Felicia clicked her tongue with disapproval. "Get your head on your shoulders, dudelette. It's nothing." She scooped another dodgeball up from the spoils of the field, outstretched one leg into her ideal shooting position, and lobbed it at the opposing team. She raised her hand in a fist pump when it made contact. "Whoo! Dead-shot, headshot!"

Felicia turned to Mabel to celebrate her victory so preemptively, she didn't notice where the ball had hit until the casualty from the other side of the gym cried out "my knee!"

Felicia shrugged "Eh, close enough."

Mabel was too preoccupied watching the wall to notice. "I dunno..."

Xandra poked her head over from the sidelines of dodgeball victims at the other side of the court. She cupped a hand to her mouth while she spoke over towards both of them. "Anatomically, they're the head of the calf, knees. And great on bees."

Mabel gasped a bit, distracted from her distraction. She hugged onto the dodgeball in her arms. "Knees _are_ great on bees."

"I can have a very long conversation with an inanimate object. These are skills that I have," Xandra told Mabel's ball.

* * *

Paper-cut in places one would normally never nightmare of receiving them, but otherwise intact, Dipper finally made it to the shower. The mirror mummy was lumbering far away, as every step it took caused it to shatter further. The origami person, who had much better luck at matching Dipper's pace, had wrapped itself around him in a strangle-hold. A new ink word had blotted on his forehead, reading in a blurry fashion thanks to the all-too-close proximity of its featureless face, only the word "away". It continued scratching him while it pawed at the journal-shaped lump Dipper had hidden under his shirt.

In one unified motion, Dipper turned the knob of the shower on and pulled himself towards the wall, not directly against it, but close enough that only the back half of him would be hit by the stream. A stream of freezing cold water spurted across his scalp, down his back, and into any other uncomfortable fabric fold it could seep into.

The paper arm flailed limply, weighted by the pressure. The folded elbow of the paper person's chokehold shriveled into mush. The shape drooped against his collar, lifeless, the way paper was supposed to be. Dipper stood in place for another few seconds, long enough to let out an exhausted breath. The pink parchment of his hall pass and the jumbled lettering of a healthy BMI chart pooled around his sneakers.

Dipper turned both the shower handle and himself, shutting the water off. His back pressed to the tile. The lumbering jingle of glass footsteps crept into his eardrums, and any sense of relief washed straight off of him.

The fragments of the mirror had fractured twisted beyond recognition as flat glass. Instead, it bore more resemblance to a stained window. Any image of a mummy or a man had been wiped from the reflection. Instead, a broken image of Dipper himself stared straight back through the thousands of tiny pieces. It was warped beyond clarity, yet somehow still identical to him, all the way to his presently bleeding forehead, circular pupils and white-sclera-colored eyes.

The instant he took note of this detail, his reflection blinked out of sync with Dipper himself. A yellow hue took hold of the reflection's eyes. A smile broke across the glass, so madly strained, it may as well have cracked audibly. Its mouth didn't move, and yet, Dipper could hear Bill's voice echo through his head. "WHY DO YOU NEVER PLAY WITH SHARP OBJECTS? YES, MENTAL SCARRING'S THE BETTER SEQUEL, BUT FLESH SCARS STILL HOLD UP. HERE. I'LL TEACH WHAT THIS INSTITUTIONALIZED TRANSMISSION OF COMMUNALLY ENDORSED DUMB IDEAS WON'T. ON MY COUNT."

Before he could hear any numbers, Dipper pushed off of the tile to get some distance. His wet shoes skid across the floor. He slipped back into the bathroom area, between two rows of sinks and mirrors. Aside from the person-shaped hole in one of them, the mirrors stretched across both sides, providing a seemingly infinite reflection of himself in the dimly lit locker room.

The warped reflection of his possessed self stepped into the mirror's frame, and stopped just as suddenly. In that second, the two of them seemed to stretch on as an eternal chain. The reflection raised its ten fingers overhead to count. "TEN."

Dipper looked around him for something, anything, that could help stop the reflection, yet the only plan that he could think of was to back by the same hole in the mirror and duck. Maybe, like a puzzle, the pieces could fit back where they'd been and be stuck there. It wasn't a good plan, but it was, by technicality, a plan, and that was the best Dipper had for now.

"SEVEN, THIRTEEN, TWENTY EIGHT, ONE!"

Dipper moved back and ducked, anticipating the charge. Instead, the mirror image had remained completely still. It lowered its hand partway. Then, as Dipper was scrambling both to stand up and to think of what to do next, the reflection charged him. Its shattered fingers clutched Dipper's throat, pricking him dozens of times with a single gras.

With the tips of his toes still on the ground, Dipper writhed back. He had meant to smack them both into the already-broken mirror, but, in the struggle, twisted diagonally instead, straight into the closest sink. Both the mirror's torso and Dipper's head smacked into the porcelain at full velocity. A crack spread across them.

In a wave, the glass silhouette of a mirror fractured into a swirling, misshapen void, absorbing the colors into an inversion of natural light. The plane of reality itself seemed to fold in its presence, creasing upright into a hexagonal form around each forming shard. For one instant, the locker room didn't exist, nor did gravity, or even a sense of time. In its place was a crystalline blob, the same rich blue of the amorphous night, shimmering with an unnatural glow of blood-colored stars. The substance engulfed Dipper down to his eyeballs, until he could no longer perceive any part of himself, only the stranglehold that the endless mass of a rift amongst the sky could trap him in.

Then, the image sputtered back into view of flooded floorboards. Shards of sink littered the bathroom tile. Water trickled from the broken faucet against the right side of his face. The drops fell in a metronome, hypnotic and maddening at once, though neither state lasted long before his consciousness faltered.

Dipper's cell phone rang beside him. He didn't hear it.


End file.
